It all comes down to energy. Early in the day of the automobile the electric car was the simple, clean, quiet and reliable choice. It had more than sufficient power, but the batteries of the day could not store enough energy to compete with a tank-full of petroleum (or even alcohol). This turned into a killer deficiency. The electric was left driving short trips around town; gasoline offered range, all-day cruising, FREEDOM! Despite the pathetic 14.9% average efficiency of the US gasoline-powered fleet, a 15-gallon tank of gas can be turned into a whopping 82 kilowatt-hours to the wheels, yet it weighs less than 100 pounds and refills in a few minutes. A typical lead-acid battery pack for an EV weighs hundreds of pounds and holds less than 20 kWH, yet requires several hours to recharge. Clearly, something had to change before battery-powered vehicles could compete on the same turf.

Ever since the first Li-ion powered tzero showed that electric vehicles could overcome the range barrier, it was obvious that some battery technology would eventually make the EV competitive. The Li-ion battery with the lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO2) cathode clearly wasn't it; cobalt is too expensive, it charges too slowly, and it releases oxygen when overheated which leads to destructive and hazardous thermal runaway. Besides, the $60,000 cost of a tzero full of 18650 cells was clearly beyond what the market will bear.

Several different chemistries are now vying for dominance. Valence Technology's Saphion, based on doped lithium iron phosphate, is made from very inexpensive materials and has no thermal runaway problems. Altair Nano has a number of products, some of which are meant for batteries; I understand that their lithium titanate is going into some fast-charging cells which also beat the thermal runaway issue and have excellent charging performance and cycle life. A123 Systems is cagey about their exact technology, but they've announced some power tools powered by their cells. Their cycle life is claimed to be good, and charge/discharge rate is stellar: 5 minute recharge, and discharge power almost up to 5 kW/kg. One of these appears bound to kick NiMH out of conventional hybrid vehicles; after that, the drop of price with increased manufacturing volume will lead to more and energy storage aboard vehicles. If this is combined with recharging from the grid, it will lead to less and less need for petroleum. It only takes one technology to cross the finish line to make it all happen.

Enter a dark horse to the race. a barium-titanate ultracapacitor. EEStor claims a unit with the following characteristics:

The product weighs 400 pounds and delivers 52 kilowatt-hours.

As of last year selling price would start at $3,200 and fall to $2,100 in high-volume production.

Reading this at The Energy Blog was another "HOLY CRAP!" moment for me. This is far cheaper than Li-ion batteries. Its energy density is comparable, the cycle life is far beyond the needs of a vehicle, and the power density is astounding. At a 10-minute discharge rate, I calculate the power output as up to 312 kilowatts. That's more than FOUR HUNDRED HORSEPOWER from a 400-pound package! If it can be drained in 200 seconds, it would out-power a Bugatti Veyron.

This product looks like it would make a killer EV all by itself, but it would also shine as the storage element of a GO-HEV. Suppose you could get a third of the capacity for half price: 17 kWh for $1600, weighing 150 pounds. It would drive a Prius+ about 60 miles, a somewhat larger car perhaps 45-50. If it let you eliminate 80% of a 750 gallon/year gasoline habit and replace it with $600 of electricity, it would save you about $800 a year at the gasoline prices I see.

Would you buy it? (You're reading this; do I really need to ask?)

If these things work as advertised, the first auto manufacturer to market them is going to see the fuel consumption of its products plummet. It would constitute a suit for divorce from the oil industry and everything else it is associated with. It could turn "electric" into synonyms for clean, quiet, safe, economical, and screaming performance. And peak oil? Who'd care? Overnight, oil would cease to be relevant.

If we look at British estimates for cost and assume $1.5 million/lane/mile $2.4 million/lane/mile for construction of rails down freeway medians, the entire Interstate system could get another 2 lanes of rails for $129 $206 billion. If overhead wires for electric power cost another $500 $800 thousand/lane-mile, the total rises to $172 $275 billion. This could potentially replace all truck diesel
used on expressways.

As of 2004, the transport sector was using 42.5 billion gallons/year (2.774 million bbl/day) of diesel. If 60% of this was burned on freeways, we'd have been able to save 1.66 million bbl/day; if the electrification of freeways allowed e.g. battery- or flywheel-powered operation for some local legs also, the total could go over 2 million barrels/day.

The total oil production of Iraq is now down to 1.7 million barrels/day. At $65/bbl, it's worth $110 million/day ($40.3 billion/yr).

If we'd spent the cost of the Iraq war on getting rid of our own petroleum demand, we'd have been able to pay for it at least once by now, maybe twice. Ignoring the cost of maintenance and electricity, the savings would have paid back the cost in about 7 years at current oil prices. The return would be on-going, and boosted by reduced noise, smog and particulates. All we'd have had to do to Saddam is blow up his oil infrastructure so he had no money to buy weapons.

When I think about what we could have done versus what we did, it disgusts me.

UPDATE: Figures corrected for kilometers vs. miles (original erroneous figures in strikeout where this displayed unambiguously). At least I wasn't trying to get this post to Mars.

I went to the EIA to get a reference for a figure, and found that the petroleum page was missing the link for historical data. I didn't see any links for the Annual Energy Review, either.

I spent some time poking around, and finally found a link to the data for historical electric data; from there I was able to construct the URL for the petroleum page and got what I wanted. But this should not have been necessary; the links should have remained in their usual places.

Is there an effort at the DOE to put our historical data down the memory hole?

In a comment in "Treating irregularity", Marcos Dumay de Medeiros says this about direct-carbon fuel cells:

It annoys me a lot your insistence in making your calculations with the carbon fuel cell. It is experimental!

All right, for the sake of argument let us assume that the direct-carbon fuel cell scheme has some show-stopping problem and it's not usable. Not for vehicular power, not in stationary applications, not anywhere. If it doesn't work, what are the options?

Humor aside, when reality creeps in I am not one to bust it for trespassing. I always have a plan B, and in this case plan B is...

zinc-air fuel cells! (Tell me you didn't know that was coming. I won't believe you, but it'll be good for a laugh.)

From a mole of carbon (93960 cal/mol), a mole of ZnO and an indeterminate amount of
heat, we get a mole of zinc metal (84670 cal/mol) and a mole of carbon monoxide
(68560 cal/mol) plus waste heat. Ignoring the waste heat, the 93960 cal of reactants
yields 153230 calories of products. The question becomes, can these make as much
useful output as a DCFC can make of raw carbon?

I believe so. Zinc metal is convertible to ZnO and electricity with an efficiency
of roughly 62%, and CO can be fed to either a molten-carbonate fuel cell or a solid-oxide
fuel cell; both can make electricity at an efficiency of roughly 60%. Here's what
we'd get out of a mole of carbon via the two options:

Table 2: Yield comparison

Reactant

ΔH, gram calories/mol

Converter

Efficiency

Yield, cal/mol

C

93960

DCFC

80%

75168

Zn

84670

Zn/air fuel cell

62%

52495

CO

68560

SOFC or MCFC

60%

41136

TOTAL

153230

93631

As long as you have a source of heat to drive the zinc reduction, you can get about
24% more total output using the zinc cycle compared to the direct-carbon system. There's
a second fallback too: if
neither the MCFC nor the SOFC are ready for widespread commercial use in time, carbon
monoxide makes a perfectly good gas-turbine fuel. It can probably be converted to work
as efficiently as natural gas, or about 55% in a combined-cycle plant. There's plan C.

Going back to dealing with irregularity, a carbon/zinc cycle helps in this way:

It adds another storable fuel, carbon monoxide, to the chain. CO can be stored
in spent gas wells and other gas-tight reservoirs.

It adds flexibility.

A direct-carbon fuel cell yields carbon dioxide,
which is mainly suitable for sequestration. The zinc reduction produces carbon monoxide,
which is a chemical feedstock as well as an energy source.

A system which depends on carbon as a feedstock halts when it runs out of fixed carbon.
Zinc metal can be produced from oxide either chemically (reduced with carbon) or elecrolytically;
this allows wind, solar, nuclear or hydro to substitute for carbon.

There's one more issue to deal with, and that's the dependence of the solar-thermal zinc
reduction system (ZnO + C + Δ -> Zn + CO) on cloudless days. There just aren't
many of those in some parts of the country that need energy. This is not a killer,
because solar heat is just the sexiest source of energy to drive the reaction; it could just
as easily be driven by surplus wind electricity (turning the immediate supply of wind power
into two different storable fuels) or by combustion of part of the carbon (sacrificing the
carbon monoxide byproduct). Either way, there's a reasonable alternative.

The perennial complaint about the major renewable energy sources (and the lament of
their users and advocates) is that they are irregular. If the sun shone all the
time, you wouldn't need batteries; if the wind blew all the time, you wouldn't need
backup generators; if it rained the same amount every day or even every month, you
probably wouldn't need hydro dams and could make do with weirs and long penstocks. The
grid manager can't schedule a one of them.

Unless all supply-demand matching can be handled by
DSM,
any system which depends on alternative energy is going need storage of some
type. The devil is in the details, as ever. Availability of energy varies
on scales of hours, days and even by the seasons; a collection system which is
adequate on the average is going to be deficient at some times and produce large
surpluses at others. There are loads which are well-matched to certain types
of production (air conditioning vs. solar) but we aren't lucky enough to have all
loads dovetail with renewable sources. Some kind of buffer is needed to split
the difference.

Buffers on the scale of seconds to hours are available, in the works or proposed.
Capacitors work well to buffer variations on the scale of milliseconds to seconds; flywheels
are well-suited to smoothing differences lasting seconds to minutes, vanadium redox
"flow batteries" have been suggested for handling time scales of seconds to hours, and
compressed-air storage is being proposed as part of a wind-storage scheme. But
only compressed air is capable of dealing with daily variations at reasonable cost, and
none of the above deal well with variations lasting weeks to months.

Fortunately, a suitable medium seems to be available. Two, actually.

Storage media

The classic stockpiles of energy are stacked firewood and heaps of
coal. Oil is invisible by comparison; tank farms represent huge reserves, but they
look the same whether full or empty and have no power as images. Yet not all classic
energy is meant for the fireplace; food laid by is energy too, whether it is dried or salted
meat, jars of food canned or pickled, roots in the root cellar, packed granaries, full
silos or haylofts stuffed with animal fodder. Lately, fodder storage has expanded to
square or round bales of hay kept either in or out of doors.

Fodder is biomass suited for ruminants. For combustion it needn't even be edible, just dry.

The favored energy crops these days are coppiced willow or poplar and various perennial
grasses. The wet tropics produce good crops of sugar cane, but temperate zones are better
suited to the likes of switchgrass or Miscanthus. The latter is reported to produce
25-45 metric tons per hectare per
year1 with gusts up
to 60. The temperate-zone grasses are particularly attractive because they die back to the
rhizomes during the winter, and the stems left above ground become dry and easy to harvest.
The standing crop represents stored energy. Once cut and baled, it can be stored on scales
of days to months.

Baled grass is not an ideal storage medium. Its flaws include:

It requires proper and precise drying to attain its best characteristics.

It rots, loses energy and may spontaneously combust if allowed to get or remain damp.

Its general bulk limits how far it can be transported and how much can be stored on or near the field without impairing the next season's growth.

It would be best to convert the raw biomass to another medium: something waterproof, compact, more easily transported and stable over the duration of a year or years.

This medium exists. It is one of the oldest fuels known to man: charcoal.

Charcoal is the solid product of the slow anaerobic pyrolysis or partial combustion of most
forms of biomass. It is so stable that it is used for radiocarbon dating of prehistoric
human activities. Aside from its friability, it is as storable as coal and can be handled
in similar ways. It contains little or no sulfur or heavy metals, burns much more
cleanly than coal, and is usable as a substitute for coal or coke in many processes.

As I've noted before, the conversion of biomass to charcoal loses roughly half of its
stored energy as heat and combustible gas. The presumed 1.3 billion (dry) tons of
available waste biomass has a total energy of 20.8 exajoules (19.7 quads) at 16 GJ/ton.
This is over 3 times as much energy as the natural gas used for electricity.
At an average productivity of 35 tons/ha for Miscanthus, each additional million hectares
devoted to biomass production would yield another 560 PJ (0.53 quads). Of the ~32 million
ha devoted to maize alone, perhaps 10 million could be converted to Miscanthus as part
of a price-support program. This might yield in the neighborhood of 5.3 quads of fuel, for
a total of 24 quads of biomass. Other conversions might add to this.

Managing the energy supply

Once you've got the biomass, the question becomes how to manage it for the greatest
benefit. Some of the options are flexible, but are linked to cycles which are not
terribly efficient. For instance, the production of bio-oil by flash pyrolysis yields
about 70% of the mass and energy of the input as oil; the rest becomes char or gas.
The bio-oil is suitable for boiler or perhaps gas-turbine fuel, but the net efficiency is
low (if fed to a 35%-efficient steam plant, 24.5%; if fed to a 40%-efficient gas turbine,
28%). On top of this, it does not store well. It appears likely that charcoal
will soon be convertible to electricity at 80% efficiency using direct-carbon fuel cells;
maximizing the production of charcoal appears to be a good strategy.

Processing ~1.6 billion tons of biomass through a carbonization step which turns 28% of
it into charcoal would yield ~450 million tons of charcoal. For the purpose of this
analysis, I'm going to assume that the charcoal is not typically used to produce electric
power for the grid. Some of it goes to mobile DCFC's aboard vehicles, replacing
petroleum fuels in internal-combustion engines; an average demand of 183 GW would require
approximately 220 million metric tons/year of charcoal for vehicle fuel. The remainder
could go for chemical production, metallurgy, strategic stockpiles or just to be
sequestered. For whatever reason, it's the last (renewable) choice for grid power.

If the carbonization process loses about 52% of the energy in the raw biomass, it seems
prudent to use it well and wisely. Charcoal stores well, so the carbonization could
be scheduled to produce gas when needed. If the heat and gas can be converted to
electricity at efficiencies typical of simple-cycle gas-turbine powerplants (say, 40%), the
recoverable electricity from the waste biomass would be 4.33 EJ (1200 billion kWH) with
another 116 petajoules (32.4 billion kWh) from each million hectares converted to biomass
crops. This is an average power of 137 GW from the base amount of biomass and a
further 3.7 GW from each million hectares converted; for the case of 10 million ha
converted, the average available electric power from carbonization would be 174 GW.

The average US electric consumption in the year 2004 was roughly 450 GW. An average
power of 174 GW is over 38% of the total. Could this fill the gaps in other renewable
supplies? The answer appears to be "it might, depending". I have neither the
time nor the data to do a comprehensive analysis of the adequacy or lack thereof, but just
to try to get a feel for it I'll guesstimate this by geographic area.

The following includes a certain amount of hand-waving. You have been warned.

South and southwest

In the south and southwest, air conditioning accounts for a very large fraction of the
total electric consumption. The peak demand coincides with sunny conditions, so it
seems that solar might well suffice for half of total electric requirements there. The
use of ice-storage systems would allow a day's production to carry cooling demand overnight,
eliminating the need to generate or store electricity for the purpose. Solar could also
be used to meet other power requirements during daylight. How much is that? As
an educated guess, half seems reasonable. Adding 38% from carbonization leaves only 12%
to be met by other sources. Nuclear already accounts for 20% of total US electric
production, so that seems to be taken care of.

Midwest

The midwest is a fairly windy place. The windiest sections are also among the least
populated, but HVDC transmission may go some ways toward bringing supply and demand together. The total amount of wind power potentially available is enormous; it is large even compared to
total 2004 US consumption of 3953.4
billion kWh. Per
this list,
the wind power from the top 20 states could meet this fraction of total US electric demand:

Rank

State

BillionkWh/yr

Fraction of 2004US electricconsumption

1.

North Dakota

1,210

31%

2.

Texas

1,190

30%

3.

Kansas

1,070

27%

4.

South Dakota

1,030

26%

5.

Montana

1,020

26%

6.

Nebraska

868

22%

7.

Wyoming

747

19%

8.

Oklahoma

725

18%

9.

Minnesota

657

17%

10.

Iowa

551

14%

11.

Colorado

481

12%

12.

New Mexico

435

11%

13.

Idaho

73

1.8%

14.

Michigan

65

1.6%

15.

New York

62

1.6%

16.

Illinois

61

1.5%

17.

California

59

1.5%

18.

Wisconsin

58

1.5%

19.

Maine

56

1.4%

20.

Missouri

52

1.3%

TOTAL

10470

265%

Of the top 10 states, I would put only Texas, Montana and Wyoming outside the Midwest; the remaining 7 have a potential of 6,111 billion kWh/year, or 155% of 2004 US consumption. There's clearly enough energy there to do most anything we want.

Unfortunately, the availability does not coincide with the times we want to do it. Wind
has a capacity factor of about 30-40%; it may be feasible to use wind to meet more than that much demand using storage of ice and hot water, but it's not obvious to me without information I don't have right now (if demand is phased opposite to supply it could be less). Still, if wind can handle 40% of demand and biomass carbonization can take care of 38%, the remaining 22% is very close to what's currently met by nuclear.

California and Pacific northwest

California, Oregon and Washington are problems. California has 10% of the US population, but it ranks #17 for wind-energy resources and its potential is only 1.5% of US consumption; outside the sunny southern part of the state its renewable resources don't look good. Oregon and Washington aren't even on the list. Idaho's population of 1.4 million (~0.45% of US population) might be able to export much of the 1.8% of US consumption that its windpower represents, but that would easily be consumed by Washington alone.

Together, Washington and Oregon have approximately 7.8 million people, roughly 2.6% of the nation's population. They are also major exporters of forestry products, and would be equally major sources of the biomass needed to power this scheme. They might be able to capture a fair amount of their needs with hydro projects. 2.6% of the US's electric consumption is about 103 TWH/yr; if 38% of this comes from carbonization gas, 30% from imported wind and 20% from nuclear, the remaining 12% could come from a combination of nuclear and hydro with some extra available for export. The exports might meet the remaining demand of northern California, or they might not.

The oceans might fill that gap. The Pacific has considerable wave energy potential, and the wind between 5 and 50 miles off the east and west coasts might produce as much as 900 GW. Unfortunately, the technologies for tapping this power are just being developed.

East

The East is in somewhat of a pickle. On-shore wind resources are not great, they are far from the windier parts of the country (HVDC transmission might help, if opposition to transmission lines can be overcome), conditions are often cloudy compared to the less-humid West, and the dense coastal populations don't have anything like the per-capita biomass resources of the corn belt or PNW rain forests. Only Maine hits the top 20 list for wind resources, at #19.

There are a lot of people to be served there. The combined populations of New York and Florida alone are about as much as the west coast states; adding in MA, NJ, MD, VA, NC, SC, and GA brings the total to 86.3 million, or almost 29% of the total population. Wind and wave energy from the continental shelf might also address this deficiency, but we don't even have a significant test program in place for such devices, let alone a plan for installing sufficient capacity.

If the East has to get 30% of its electricity from something outside the set of (nuclear, solar, wind, carbonization) it might be a reason to tap that 230 million tons/year of carbon I set aside above. If the east accounts for 29% of total US electric consumption (~1150 billion kWH out of 3953.4), direct carbon fuel cells could produce 30% of that using about 47 million metric tons of carbon2. This is about 20% of the possible set-aside, and appears well within reason.

Net effects

A system based on biomass cycles lasting months and carbon storable on a scale of years
addresses the irregularity of wind, solar and hydro. The quantities available appear more
than sufficient to fill in missing average supply, and it appears likely that it can be scheduled
to cover immediate shortfalls. A more detailed analysis will be needed to determine the
specifics.

The next thing to notice is that it appears feasible to use renewable carbon burned in DCFC's
to replace all vehicle
fuel3, and wind, solar
and carbonization gas to replace all coal and gas burned in electric powerplants. Getting
the job done completely probably requires off-shore wind/wave energy harvesting plus solar energy
systems on a scale never seen before, but all of these technologies are under development and even
being installed on a pilot scale. About 4.8 billion barrels/year of petroleum products,
6-some quads of natural gas and a billion tons of coal would be surplus.

The impact of petroleum reductions alone would be huge. The US balance of payments
deficit for some years ran roughly equal to the value of petroleum imports. Eliminating
the demand from motor vehicles would cut a fraction roughly equal to US imports; other petroleum
needs might be replaced by materials derived from the biomass processing. The replacement
of coal mining by grass cutting would eliminate many dangerous underground jobs and also many
open pit mines and spoils heaps. The mining jobs would be replaced by industrial and
service jobs building, maintaining and operating the wind, solar and biomass systems.
The almost inevitable result is that the dollar would rise, and so would wages. This
translates to higher standards of living for millions.

Wind, solar and biomass would replace about 28 quads of petroleum, 6 quads of natural gas
and perhaps 25 quads of coal. Some of these would be replaced by wind, solar or
biomass-derived charcoal. As much as 230 million tons/year of charcoal would be kept back
from mobile use. This charcoal could be devoted to uses (e.g. soil amendment to retain
nutrients) which sequester carbon, or used in stationary industrial processes which allow the
carbon to be captured and stored. Properly executed, this would allow the system to be
strongly carbon negative.

Hardhat

You are an atheist, a rationalist, a believer in the triumph of science and of reason over libido. You can’t stand mumbo jumbo, ritual, spiritual nonsense of any kind, and you refuse to allow for these longings in others.

Astrologers, Scientologists and new–age crystal ball creeps are no different in your view from priests, rabbis and imams. They’re all just weak–minded pilgrims on the road to easy answers. Nature as revealed by science is awesome enough for you, but it’s a nature that needs curbing and taming by us on our evolutionary journey to perfection.

Your heros are Einstein, Darwin, Marx and — these days — Gould, Blakemore, Watson, Crick and Rosalind Franklin. Could you be hiding a little behind those absolutist views, worried that, if you let in a few doubts and contradictory ideas, the whole edifice might crumble? Loosen up a bit and try to enjoy the amazing variety of human belief systems. Don’t worry — it’s unlikely you’ll end up chanting your days away in some distant mountain cult.
What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.
¶ 1/08/2006 07:30:00 PM4 commentslinks to this post

In an NYTimes piece that's not freely available on-line (but summarized by WattHead), Thomas Friedman shows that he's gotten with the program. Some excerpts of excerpts:

Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do.

Living green is ... a national security imperative.

... there's a huge difference between what these bad regimes can do with $20-a-barrel oil compared to $60-a-barrel oil....

We need a persident and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with longterm incentives for renewable energies - wind, solar, biofuels - rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill.

Large chunks of this could have come out of Petroleum independence as a growth engine. I doubt that Mr. Friedman read it, or has even heard of this blog, but it shows how far these ideas are starting to penetrate.

I would be thrilled if he'd paid any attention to me, but it doesn't matter. There's a positive vision opposed to the oil interests represented by Bush and Cheney. People who read nothing more technical than the NYTimes editorial page are learning that we can do more than just pay money to terrorists for the privilege of driving. We might do something about our deteriorating balance of payments and take power away from corrupt elements world-wide. Damn, that feels good!

The Google ads are like a free-to-you tip jar. But there's bigger stuff out there.

As most of you know, I entered a concept in the SinceSlicedBread idea contest a few months ago. They are about to post a list of the finalists, which the public will then vote for. The winners get substantial cash rewards - and the voters don't pay for it, the SEIU does. It's another free-to-you tip jar.

But to vote, you have to be registered there by Monday. If you haven't already, I recommend you go there and do it. It gives you a chance to bestow some mighty big kudos on somebody.

While I'm trying to get the amount of hand-waving in the "Irregularity" essay down to sane levels (I don't want to pick on other people for making vague, unsupported statements and then make a hypocrite of myself), I am also thinking about what to write about next.

There are at least three mega-engineering concepts I've been noodling about. Parapundit touched on one (aerosols) the other day; the other two are orbital sunshades and ultra-large convection towers. I'm not sure how much time it would take to finish a treatment of any of these, but given a choice, what would you like to see?